Denny had begun to get back into his clothes, pausing now and then to
dabble tentatively at the freshly broken bruise with the wet towel
which Ogden had at last forced him to accept, when the door of the
dressing-room opened, and Hogarty stepped briskly inside and closed
the door behind him.
The ex-lightweight ignored entirely the covertly delighted grin that
lit up Bobby Ogden's features at his appearance. His own too-pale,
too-thin lips were curved in a ghost of a smile; his face had lost all
its dangerous tautness, but the greatest change of all lay there in
his eyes. Their flaring antagonism had burnt itself out. And when
Hogarty spoke it was once more in his smoothly perfect, delightfully
measured, best professor-of-English style, for all that his opening
remark was couched in the vernacular.
"Mr. Bolton," he began to the boy sitting quiet before him, "it looks
as though we would have to hand it to you--which I earnestly desire
you to believe I am now doing, with both hands. It may eventually
prove that I lost a most valuable assistant through this morning's
little flurry. I am not quite certain yet as to that as Boots is not
sufficiently himself to give the matter judicious consideration.
"He still thinks I crossed him for the entertainment's sake--which is
of little immediate importance. What I did come in for was to listen
to anything at all that you may have to tell me. You'll admit, of
course, that while your explanation as to your errand was strictly to
the point, it was scarcely comprehensive. My own unfortunate temper
was, no doubt, largely the cause of your brevity."
He hesitated a moment, clearing his throat and gazing blankly at the
grinning Ogden.
"As Ogden here has of course told you, I'm--well, rather touchy when
interrupted at my favorite pastime, and especially so when I am trying
to get a few minutes relaxation with a pin-headed person who insists
upon playing without watching the board.
"But you spoke of wanting an opportunity of--er--entering the
game professionally. I'm not admitting you're a world-beater,
understand--or anything like that! You've just succeeded in
putting away a man who was as formidable as the best of them,
five years ago. And five years isn't today, by any means. I've been
looking for a real possibility to appear for so long that I've
grown exceedingly sensitive at each fresh failure. And yet--and yet,
if you did have the stuff----!"
Again he stopped and Denny, watching, saw the proprietor's face glow
suddenly with a savage sort of exultation. His eyes, half-veiled
behind drooping lids that twitched a little, went unseeingly over the
boy's head as though they were visualizing a triumph so long
anticipated that it had become almost a lost hope. Again that promise
of something ominous blackened the pupils--something totally dangerous
that harmonized perfectly with the snarl upon his lips.
Hogarty's whole attitude was that of a man who wanted to believe and
yet who, because he knew that the very measure of his eagerness made
him doubly easy to convince, had resolved not to let himself accept
one spurious proof. And all his skepticism was shot through and
through with hate--a deadly, patient sort of hatred for someone which
was as easy to see as it was hard for the big-shouldered boy to
understand.
There was craft in the ex-lightweight's bearing--a gentleness almost
stealthy when he leaned forward a little, as if he feared that the
first abrupt move or word on his part would frighten away that timid
hope.
"I believe that you said some one sent you. You--you did not mention
the name?"
Denny leaned over and picked up his coat from a chair beside the
bench, searching the pockets until he found the card which the plump,
brown-clad newspaper man had given him. Without a word he reached out
and put it in Hogarty's hands.
It bore Jesse Hogarty's Fourteenth Street address across its face.
Hogarty turned it over.
"Introducing the Pilgrim," ran the caption in the cramped handwriting
of Chub Morehouse's stubby fingers. And, beneath, that succinct
sentence which was not so cryptic after all:
"Some of them may have science, and some of them may have speed, but
after all it's the man who can take punishment who gets the final
decision. Call me up, if this ever comes to hand."
Very deliberately Hogarty deciphered the words, lifted a vaguely
puzzled face to Young Denny, who waited immobile--and then returned
again to the card. He even nodded once in thorough appreciation of the
title which Morehouse had given the boy; he smiled faintly as he
remembered Denny as he had stood there in the entrance of the big
room, a short while before, and realized how apt the phrase was. Then
he began to whistle, a shrill, faint, monotonous measure, the
calculating glitter in his eyes growing more and more brilliant.
"So!" he murmured thoughtfully. "So-o-o!"
And then, to Denny:
"Was there--did he make any comment in particular, when he gave you
this?"
The boy's eyes twinkled.
"He--made several," he answered. "He said that there was a man at that
address--meaning you--that would fall on my neck and weep, if I
happened to have the stuff. And he warned me, too, not to think that
Jed The Red fought like a school boy, just because he was a
second-rater--because he didn't, nothing like that!"
Hogarty laughed aloud. That sudden, staccato chuckle was almost
startling coming from his pale lips. It hushed just as quickly as it
had begun.
"Jed The Red, eh?" he reiterated softly, and he began tapping the card
with his fingertips. "I see, or at least I am commencing to get a
glimmer of those possibilities which Mr. Morehouse may have had in
mind. And now I think the one best thing to do would be to call him
up, as he has here requested. As soon as you finish dressing Ogden
here will show you the rest of the works, if you'd care to look around
a little. It is entirely likely that we shall want to talk with you
directly."
He wheeled abruptly toward Ogden who had been listening without a
word, the broad grin never leaving his lips. It was the silk-shirted
boy to whom Hogarty addressed the rest of that sentence.
"And you," he said, and his voice shed with astounding completeness
all its syllabled nicety. "You try to make yourself useful as well as
pestilential. Get him a bit of adhesive for that cut. It looks as bad
as though a horse had kicked him there.
"And the rest of your mob will be swarming in here in a few minutes,
too. You can tell them that Sutton is--er--indisposed this morning,
and that they'll have to play by themselves."
He nodded briefly to Denny and opened the door. But he stopped again
before he passed out.
"There's one other question, Mr. Bolton," he said over his shoulder.
"And please believe that I am not usually so inquisitive. But I'm more
than a little curious to know why you did not present this card
first--and go through the little informal examination I arranged for
you afterward? It would have insured you a far different reception.
Was there any special reason, or did you just overlook it?"
Denny dabbed again at the red drop on his chin.
"No, I didn't exactly forget it," he stated ponderously. "But, you
see, I kind of thought if I just told you first that I wanted to see
if I had any chance, you wouldn't make any allowances for me because
I----"
Hogarty's second nod which cut him short was the quintessence of crisp
satisfaction.
"I understand," he cut in. "Perfectly! And quite right--quite right!"
The ex-lightweight proprietor was sitting with his chin clasped in
both palms, still staring at the half facetious words of introduction
which the plump newspaper man had penciled across that card, when the
door of the small office in the front of the gymnasium was pushed open
a crack, some scant fifteen minutes after his peremptory summons had
gone out over the wire, and made him lift his head.
His eyes were filmed with a preoccupation too profound to be dispelled
by the mock anxiety upon the chubby round countenance which Morehouse
thrust through that small aperture between door and frame, or his
excessively overdone caution as he swung the door wider and tiptoed
over the threshold, to stand and point a rigidly stubby finger behind
him at the trail of nail prints which Young Denny's shoes had left
across the glistening wax an hour or so earlier.
"Jesse," he whispered hoarsely, "some one has perpetrated here upon
the sacred sheen of your floor a dastardly outrage! I merely want you
to note, before you start running the guilty one to earth, that I am
making my entrance entirely in accordance with your oft-reiterated
instructions. I am not he!"
For all the change which it brought about in Hogarty's face that
greeting might have been left unspoken. He vouchsafed the fat man's
elaborate pantomime not so much as the shadow of a smile, nodded once,
thoughtfully, and let his eyes fall again to the card between his
elbows on the table-top.
"Come in, Chub," he invited shortly. "Come in." And as a clamor of
many voices in the outer entrance heralded the arrival of the rest of
Ogden's crowd: "Here comes the mob now. Come in and close the door."
Morehouse, still from head to toe a symphony in many-toned browns,
shed every shred of his facetiousness at Hogarty's crisply repeated
invitation. He closed the door and snapped the catch that made it fast
before he crossed, without a word, and drew a chair up to the opposite
side of the desk.
"Your hurry call just caught me as I was leaving for lunch," he
explained then. "And I made pretty fair time getting down here, too.
What's the dark secret?"
The black-clad proprietor lifted his lean jaw from his hands and gazed
long and steadily into the newspaper man's eyes, picked up the bit of
pasteboard which bore the latter's own name across its front and
flipped it silently across the table to him. Morehouse took it up
gingerly and read it--reversed it and read again.
"Nice little touch, that," he averred finally. "Rather neat and tasty,
if I do say it myself. 'Introducing The Pilgrim!' Hum-m-m. You can't
quite appreciate it of course, but--oh, Flash, I wish you could have
seen that big boy standing there in the door of that little backwoods
tavern, just as I saw him, about a week ago! Why, he--he was----"
"He's come!" Hogarty cut in briefly.
Morehouse's chin dropped. He sat with mouth agape.
"Huh?" he grunted. "He's--he's come where?"
Where his facetiousness had failed him Morehouse's round-eyed
astonishment, a little tinged with panic, was more than successful.
Hogarty permitted himself to smile a trifle--his queer, strained
smile.
"He is here," he repeated gravely, and the words were couched in his
choicest accents. "He came in, perhaps, an hour ago. That is his
monogramed trail across the floor which caught your eye. Oh, he's
here--don't doubt that! I'll give you a little review of the manner of
his coming, after you tell me how you ever happened to send him--why
you gave him that card? What's the answer to it, Chub?"
That same light of savage hope and cruelly calculating enmity, all so
strangely mixed with a persistent doubt, which Young Denny had seen
flare up in the ex-lightweight's eyes a little while before, back in
the dressing-room, began to creep once more across Hogarty's face.
"You know how long I've been waiting for one to come along, Chub," he
went on, almost hoarsely. "You know how I've looked for the man who
could do what none of the others have done yet, even though he is only
a second-rater. Twice I thought I had a newcomer who could put The Red
away--and put him away for keeps--and I just fooled myself because I
was so anxious to believe. I've grown a trifle wary, Chub, just a
trifle! Now, I'd like to hear you talk!"
Morehouse sat and fingered that card for a long time in absolute
silence--a silence that was heavy with embarrassment on his part. He
understood, without need of explanation, for whom that chill hatred
glowed in the spare ex-lightweight's eyes--knew the full reason for
it. And because he knew Hogarty, too, as few men had ever come to know
him, he had often assured himself that he was thankful not to be the
man who had earned it.
That knowledge had been very vividly present when, a few days
before, on the platform of the Boltonwood station, he had requested
Denny Bolton to give him back his card for a moment, after listening
to the boy's grave explanation of the raw wound across his cheek,
and on a quite momentary impulse written across its back that short
sentence which was so meaty with meaning. Every detail of Hogarty's
country-wide search for a man who could whip Jed The Red was an open
secret, so far as he was concerned; he was familiar with all the
bitterness of every fresh disappointment, but he had never seen
Hogarty's face so alive with exultant hope as it was at that moment.
And Morehouse was embarrassed and sorry, and ashamed, too, of what
seemed now must have been a weak surrender to an impulse which, after
all, could have been born of nothing but a too keen sense of humor.
Hogarty's face was more than eager. It was white and strained.
"Flash," he began at last, ludicrously uncomfortable, "Flash, I'm
sorry I wrote this, for I always told you that if I ever did send any
one to you he'd be a live one and worth your trouble. Right this
minute I can't tell why I did it, either, unless I am one of those
naturally dangerous idiots with a perverted sense of what is really
funny. Or maybe I didn't believe he'd ever get any farther from home
than he was that morning when I gave him this card. That must have
been it, I suppose. Because I never saw him in action. Why, I never so
much as saw him kick a dog!
"I'm telling you because I don't want you to be disappointed
again--and yet I have to tell you, too, that right at the time I wrote
this stuff, Flash, just for a minute or two, I believe I did almost
think he might be an answer to your riddle. Maybe that was because he
had already licked Jed The Red once, and I should judge, made a very
thorough job of it at that. That must have influenced me some. But let
me tell you all the story and maybe you'll understand a little
better--something that I can't say for myself right at this very
instant."
Morehouse began at the very beginning, looking oftener at the card
between his fingers than at Hogarty's too brilliant eyes, which were
fairly burning his face.
"In the first place, Flash," he went on, "you know as well as I do
that The Red isn't a real champion and never will be. He has the build
and the punch, and he's game, too--you'll have to hand him that. But
stacked up against the men who held the title ten years ago he'd last
about five rounds--if he was lucky. I don't know why that is, either,
unless he is so crooked at heart that he loses confidence even in
himself when he has to face a real man. But the public at this minute
thinks he is as great as the greatest. The way he polished off The
Texan had convinced them of that--and we--well, the paper always tries
to give them what they want, you know.
"Now that was the reason I ran up north last week, after I'd got a tip
that Conway hailed originally from a little New England village back
in the hills--one of those towns that are almost as up-to-date today
as they were fifty years ago. It looked like a nice catchy little
story, which I will, of course, admit I could have faked just as well
as not. But it was the cartoons I wanted. You can't really fake
them--not after you've once known the real thing. And as it happens I
have known it, for I came from a village up that way myself.
"And, then, I was curious, too. I've always had a private opinion that
if chance hadn't pitchforked Conway into the prize-ring he'd have made
a grand success as a blackjack artist or a second-story man. But I
wanted the pictures, and it wasn't a very difficult matter either to
get them. You see I knew just where I'd find what I wanted, and things
panned out pretty much as I thought they would.
"It didn't take more than a half hour to spread the report that Conway
was practically the only really famous man in the country today, and
in a fair way to make his own home town just as celebrated. It may
sound funny to you, for you don't know the back-country as I do, but
just that short article in the daily, coupled with a few helpful hints
from me that I was looking for all the nice, touching incidents of his
boyhood days, with the opinions of the oldest inhabitants, and maybe a
few of their pictures to be used in a big Sunday feature, brought them
all out: the old circle of regulars which always sits around the
tavern stove nights, straightening out the country's politics and
attending strictly to everybody's affairs but their own.
"Eager? Man, it was a stampede! I reckon that every male inhabitant
within a radius of five miles was there when I opened the meeting with
a few choice words--every man but one, and he comes in just a little
later in this tale. They surely did turn out. It was as perfect a
mass meeting as any I've ever seen, but the crowd itself didn't get
much of a chance to talk--not individually anyhow. They were simply
the chorus of 'ayes' which the town's big man paused now and then for
them to voice.
"He did the talking, Flash. They called him 'Judge'--they most always
do in those towns. He most certainly monopolized the conversation, and
while he gave his monologue, I sat and got the best of them down on
paper. They thought I was taking notes. I'll show you his picture some
day. He's the meanest man I ever met yet--and I've met a few!
Puffy-faced and red, and too close between the eyes. Fat, too! Somehow
I'm ashamed of being plump myself, since meeting him.
"He did all the talking, and from the very first time he opened his
mouth I knew he was lying. You can always tell a professional liar; he
lies too smoothly, somehow. Well, to judge from his story Conway was
the only unspotted cherub child that had ever been born and bred in
that section. Oh, yes, _he'd_ seen the promise in Conway; _he_ knew
that Conway was to be the pride and joy of the community, right from
the first. _He'd_ always said so! Why, _he_ was the very man who had
given him his first pointers in the game, when he was cleaning up all
the rest of the boys in town, just by way of recreation. If I'd never
had a suspicion before I'd have known just from those slick sentences
of his that Conway had never been anything in that village but a
small-sized edition of the full-blown crook he is today.
"But I didn't have any reason to contradict him, did I? He was doing
all that I could ask, and more. For there wasn't a man in that whole
crowd who dared to sneeze until he got his cue from the Judge. But
that fat man got his jolt finally, just the same, and got it good,
too.
"He had just finished telling how Conway had cleaned up the village
kids, irrespective of size, whenever he felt the need of exercise, and
was looking around at the circle behind him to give them a chance to
back him up, when it happened. I told you a minute ago that I wished
you could have seen that boy, as I saw him that night, standing there
in that tavern doorway. You see, he'd come in so quietly that nobody
had heard him--come in just in time to hear the Judge's last words.
And when the Judge turned around he looked full into that boy's eyes.
"Oh, he got his, good and plenty! I didn't watch him very closely
because it was hard for me to take my eyes off the white face of that
boy at the door. But I did see that he went pretty nearly purple for a
minute, and I heard him gurgle, too, he was that surprised, before he
caught his breath. Then he stuck out one hand and tried to bluff it
out.
"'There's one of 'em, right now,' he sang out; but he should have
known that a man who's sure of his ground doesn't have to shout to
make his point. 'There's Young Denny Bolton,' he said, 'who went to
school with him, right here in this town. _Ask him_ if Jeddy Conway
was pretty handy as a boy!' And he laughed, Flash--commenced to
chuckle! Oh, there was no misunderstanding what he meant to insinuate.
'Ask him--but maybe he's still a little mite too sensitive to talk
about it yet--eh, Denny?'
"He thought he could bluff it--bluff me, with that boy standing there
in the doorway calling him a liar as if I didn't know it all, yet at
that minute I couldn't help but ask that boy a question. I think it
was mostly because I wanted to hear what the voice of a man with a
face like his would sound like, for he hadn't opened his lips to
answer that fat hypocrite's insinuation.
"So I asked him if he had known Conway well--asked him if he had had a
few set-to's with him himself. I'm not going to forget how he looked
when he turned toward me, either. I'm not going to forget the look on
his face as he swung around. And I'm remembering his voice pretty
fairly well, too, right now!
"'Maybe,' he answered me, and he almost drawled the words. 'Maybe I
did,' he said.
"Why, Flash, he couldn't have said more if he had talked for a week.
He'd said all there was to say, now, hadn't he? But it let the Judge
out, just the same, for he just gave the circle behind him the the
high sign and set the crowd to laughing for a minute or two, until the
tension was relieved. I didn't laugh myself. There didn't seem to be
much of a joke about it after seeing that boy's eyes. It was
Bolton--Young Denny, they called him--and I got his story, their side
of it at least, after he shut the door behind him.
"It's another thing I'd be more likely to understand than you would,
Flash, because you've never lived in a village like that, and I have.
Back a hundred years or so the first settlement had been named for his
family--Boltonwood, they'd called it--but I guess the strain must have
petered out. From all I could gather the Boltons had been drinking
themselves to death with unfailing regularity and dispatch for several
generations back, and I heard a choice detailed description, too, of
the way the boy's own father had made his final exit--heard it from
that moon-faced leading citizen who did all the talking--that made me
want to kick him in the face. I don't know yet why I didn't. I was
sitting on the tavern desk with my feet on a level with his face. I
should have bashed him a good one. It's one of the lost opportunities
which I'll always regret, unless maybe I take a Saturday off some day
and run up and beat him up proper!
"He gave me a nice little account of how the boy's dad had gone over,
screaming mad, with the town's elite standing around saying, 'I told
you so,' and that big scared kid kneeling beside his bed, trying to
pray--trying to make it easier for him.
"Did you ever see a flock of buzzards circling, Flash, waiting for
some wounded thing beneath them to die? No? Well, I have, and it isn't
a pretty sight either. That was what they made me think of that night.
And I learned, too, how they'd been waiting ever since for that boy to
go the way his father had traveled before him; they even told me that
the same old jug still stood in the kitchen corner, and would have
pointed out his tumble-down old place on the hill, where they had let
him go on living alone, only it was too dark for any one to see.
"Odd, now wasn't it? But it didn't come to me at that moment. I never
gave it a thought that there was a man who had licked Conway once and
might do it again. But I didn't forget him; I wanted to, that night,
but I couldn't. And I guess I was still thinking about him when some
one touched my arm the next morning, while I was waiting for the
train, and I turned around and found him standing there beside me.
"Flash, have you noticed how grave he is--kind of sober-quiet? Have
you? That comes from living too much alone. And he's only a kid, after
all--that's all, just a kid. He startled me for a moment, but the
minute I looked at him that morning I knew he had something on his
mind, and after I'd tried to make it a little easier for him I gave
him a chance to talk.
"He had a big raw welt across one cheek--a wicked thing to look at!
You've noticed it, I see. Well, he stood there fingering it a little,
trying to think of a way to begin gracefully. Then he got out the
paper with the account of Jed The Red's last go in it and jumped right
into the middle of all that was bothering him. He hunted out the
statement of Conway's share of the purse and asked me if it was true.
I told him it was--that I'd written it myself. And then he asked me,
point blank, how _he_ could get a chance at Conway. He--he said Conway
had never been able to whip him, Flash--said he didn't believe he ever
could!
"Now, I'm sentimental--I know that. But I manage to keep my feet on
the ground now and then just the same. And so I want to say right
here that it wasn't his words that counted with me. Why, I'd have
laughed in his face only for the way he said them! As it was, I said
too much. But I thought of you then--I couldn't help it, could I? It
hit me smash between the eyes! His face had been reminding me of
something--something I couldn't place until that minute. Flash, do
you know what he made me think of? Do you? Well, he looked like a
halftone print of the Pilgrim Fathers--the kind that they hang on the
walls in the district schools. And it got me--got me!--maybe you
know why. I don't. But I wrote it on this card, under your address,
and gave it to him.
"I would have laughed at him only he was so mighty grave and quiet.
One doesn't make a practice of laughing at men who are as big as he
is--not when they carry themselves like that. I kept my funny feelings
to myself, if I had any, while I spent a minute or two sizing him up.
And that brought me back to his chin--back to that big, oozing cut. I
had been waiting for an opportunity to ask him about it, and didn't
know myself how to go about it. Just from that you can realize how he
had me guessing, for it takes quite some jolt to make me coy. So I
followed his own lead finally and blurted the question right out,
without any fancy conversational trimmings, and he told me how it had
happened.
"One of his horses had kicked him. You look as though you could have
guessed it yourself! He didn't tell you, did he, Flash? No-o-o? Well,
that was it. He said he had gone blundering in on them the night
before, to feed, without speaking to them in the darkness. It isn't
hard to guess what had made him absent-minded that night. You can't
know, just from seeing it now, how bad that fresh cut was, either. It
looked bad enough to lay any man out, and I told him so. But he said
he had managed to feed his horses just the same--he'd worked them
pretty hard that week in the timber!
"It wasn't merely what he said, you see; it was the way he said it.
I've made more fuss before now over pounding my finger with a tack
hammer. And I did a lot of talking myself in that next minute or two.
A man can say a whole lot that is almost worth while when he talks
strictly to himself. It wasn't alone the fact that he had been able to
get back on his feet and keep on traveling after a blow that would
have caved in most men's skulls that hit me so hard. The recollection
of what his eyes had been like that night before, when he had handed
the Judge the lie without even opening his lips, helped too--and the
way he shut his mouth, there on the station platform, when I gave him
an opening to say his little say concerning the village in general. He
just smiled, Flash, a slow sort of a smile, and never said a word.
"Man, he knew how to take punishment! Oh, don't doubt that! I realized
right then that he had been taking it for years, ever since they had
counted his father out, with the whole house yelling for the stuff to
get him, too. He'd been hanging on, hoping for a fluke to save him.
He'd been hanging on, and he didn't squeal, either, while he was doing
it. Not--one--yip--out--of--him!
"So I made him give me back the card and I wrote the rest of this
stuff across the back of it. And again I'll tell you, Flash, right
now, I'm not sure why I did it. But I'll tell you, too, just as I told
myself a few mornings ago, back there on that village station
platform, that if I were Jed The Red and I had my choice, I wouldn't
choose to go up against a man who had been waiting five years for an
opening to swing. No--I would not! For he's quite likely to do more or
less damage. I never thought he'd turn up, and I don't know whether I
am sorry or not. But now that he's here, what are you going to do
about it?
"It's my fault, but whatever you do I want to ask you not to do one
thing. I want you to promise not to try to make a fool of the boy,
Flash? You're, well--a little bit merciless on some of 'em, you know.
It's not his fault, and I--why, damn it, I haven't met a man in years
I like as I do that big, quiet, lonesome kid! Now, there's your story.
It explains the whole thing, and my apologies go with it. What are you
going to do?"